[this_user]

> This is why nuclear power plants should be state-sponsored projects. States typically have loans at 0% rate, or even negative interests.

Not anymore with inflation at around 8% in many western countries. And even so, construction and operation still remain expensive. France's EDL is basically bankrupt if it were not for the state backstopping them. However you want to slice it, nuclear power is not economically viable, and looks even worse compared to the rapidly decreasing costs of renewable sources of energy.

So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that. That approach will do a lot more good in the long run than trying to keep the nuclear industry on life support even though it has failed for half a century to deliver on its promises.

[outworlder]

> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology

It is not obsolete. At all. You can argue that some reactor designs should not be used and I would agree. But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things. It will become obsolete if we can ever make fusion work.

We should be deploying more reactors. There are small reactors (shipping container-sized) that could be used to power small towns and are pretty safe. Good luck getting one approved and installed in your neighborhood. It's not the tech that's being held back, it's people.

Look, I love batteries, I drive EVs since 2015. But if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to provide cheap and reliable baseline power 24/7. There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.

[derriz]

The electricity from small modular reactors is far more expensive than that from large reactors - about twice as expensive by some estimates[1]. They also produce more waste per MWh generated.

The industry has been pushing in the opposite direction with larger reactors like the EPR[2] to reduce costs.

When measured by LCOE, a MWh from a new conventionally sized nuclear plant is 4 to 7 times as expensive as a MWh from solar PV, then SMR are simply out of the question from a cost point of view.

[1] https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/PIcsi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

[trashtester]

Solar is great in deserts, where the sun always shines and were the main use of electricity is air conditioning during the hottest parts of the day.

Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.

If you include the storage + grid expansion needed to compensate for the intermittent nature of most renewables (especially if you don't want to rely on fossil fuels when the wind is not blowing), the LCOE of many of them will be many times higher than just the production cost.

Meanwhile, Korea claims to be able to construct Nuclear capacity at prices down to $0.03/kwh with their APR1400 reactors:

https://www.kns.org/files/pre_paper/34/15A-435%EC%9D%B4%EA%B...

That's at least an order of magnitude lower than the cost of renewables when constant output is required.

[Gwypaas]

Awesome then that on-shore wind is even cheaper than solar, and exists at night. Then for some more, still less than 1/3 to 1/4 of nuclear you get off-shore wind with higher capacity factors.

[trashtester]

When the wind is not blowing, the cost of wind per kwh is infinite.

[freemint]

> Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.

Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home. Yes you need capacity for that but heat pumps well a lot with that.

[trashtester]

> Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home.

Sounds like you're not speaking from experience. Actually, houses are pretty lousy batteries. Most people have a range of only a few degrees that they find comfortable indoors. They will tend to set the thermostat to about the middle of that range. If they turn off the head, the temperature will go the lower end of that range after a few hours. Very few hours if it's really cold outside, and that's when it matters most.

Admittedly, my house is old and not super-well isolated, but during the coldest days of winter (around -20C), it can easily require 10kw, constantly, to keep it warm enough to prevent my wife from becoming agressive.

If we turn off the power for 2 hours, it's already pretty cold.

Heat pumps would reduce overall energy consumption, but not the need for constant use, and more isloation would reduce both, but it would still likely take several kw constantly on days like that.

[freemint]

If your house gets cold after 2 hours you do have a bad isolation.

[epistasis]

> There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.

I suggest you run the numbers on this, because I think you have them exactly reversed.

We are increasing battery production capacity 10x every five years. This could be accelerated if there was government investment as is done for every single nuclear reactor. At current rates we expect to produce 20-30TWh/year of lithium ion batteries, not including other chemistries that could be used for stationary storage but not mobile applications.

Currently in the US we are only building 2GW of reactors, but we have ~100GW of reactors quickly reaching retirement age. Even if we scale our current nuclear construction capacity 10x every five years like we do for batteries, and add in the 10 year construction time, we are going to see a big decrease in nuclear before we see an increase.

[ncmncm]

Anyway only the tiniest fraction of utility storage will ever be batteries.

[epistasis]

Your comment conveys cynicism, but I'm not sure what you're saying.

So you're proposing 100s to 1000s of TWh of utility storage in what form, exactly?

Or are you saying that there will be almost not utility storage?

Are you counting EV batteries as part of utility storage? How about if the batteries take part in vehicle to grid transmission?

People have been skeptical of batteries for decades, claiming that they are never going to be ready for EVs. Then they were ready. You can still find absolutely ridiculous videos on YouTube only a few years old of people going through all sorts of numerical arguments about volume and size to say that EVs will never work on lithium ion batteries. Millions of Tesla owners are proving them wrong on their bad "physics" every single day.

I have a feeling that utility battery storage skepticism is even less rational. Batteries are being deployed extremely effective on the grid right now, disproving the faith.

[ncmncm]

Batteries just cost more than alternatives. They are excellent for load smoothing, because they can vary power intake and output very quickly, at any wattage out, but they are an expensive place to keep energy. For home use, batteries are the only practical storage we have, which is why off-grid power is much costlier than utility scale need be.

Battery cost is per Wh of total capacity, with typically a very high limit of W in or out. Alternatives mostly cost, instead, per W of power in or out, with an increase of total Wh stored costing relatively little, mainly limited by convenience.

For example, pumped hydro. The expensive part is the turbine. (You often don't even need a dam.) Want more watts, you need another turbine; but you can usually pump up way more water than you will need.

Likewise, synthetic ammonia or hydrogen, or liquified nitrogen or compressed air. Tankage is super-cheap, but electrolysers, cryo units, and compressors cost, as do turbines. More watts out means more turbines, again.

For buoyancy storage, the floats, sea-floor pulleys, cable reels, and clutches are cheap, the size or number of winch motor / generators determines how many watts you can put in or get out. Similarly for mineshaft gravity storage: The 10,000 ton weight is cheap, and the mineshaft has plenty of depth. Wattage is in the winch.

Producing enough lithium batteries for both cars and utilities would put a serious strain on world capacity to mine lithium. It is better reserved mainly for cars, where its light weight matters. Where you do want batteries, other chemistries are likely better for utilities than fought-over lithium. I expect molten metal batteries to be competitive soon.

It is strange that most people who talk about storage seem to have no conception of what makes a thing more, or even prohibitively, expensive. Thus, Energy Vault has a $2B market cap for a system that is very obviously totally useless. People propose putting expensive electromechanical equipment on the sea floor. The storage that will be used will be the storage that is cheap to buy and cheap to use.

[epistasis]

Batteries are getting cheaper all the time as we get better at manufacturing them, and we haven't hit the inflection point on cost decreases yet, and we haven't scaled lithium production yet. And we haven't fully developed other chemistries such as iron-air that promise to be even cheaper than lithium ion and have far higher capacity/power ratios.

Chemical storage of energy is highly inefficient, which is fine when we have super super cheap energy, but the capital costs of conversion and storage will probably require nearly continuous usage of the, say, electrolyzers in order to make the storage project feasible.

Perhaps you are right, and I really appreciate you laying out your reasoning, but I would bet otherwise about grid storage! None of the players for doing alternatives are anywhere near market ready, and batteries are being deployed today. As they get cheaper they will be deployed even more.

[epistasis]

Argh, there's a typo there, we expect 20-30TWh/year in 2031.

[samstave]

I have long thought there should be a global nuclear consortium and have that organization build and run and manage and secure all the nuclear power plants in the world.

Earth/Humanity needs electricity FOREVER. Its bizarre that we cant come together over this expressly universal need. This and water.

[ncmncm]

A global nuclear consortium would have as its first goal its own continuance and its continued hegemony over energy policy. It would be catastrophic. Fortunately there is no such possibility.

[freemint]

> But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things.

Patently false. The sun shines 24/7. This (besides power satellites) offers other possibilities like a world wide connected grid. Even if you are a proponent of nuclear you will also need that, as i assume you do not want to put reactors in every country.

[bozhark]

Had to delete my one line response because you embodied everything I meant. Cheers

[belorn]

> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that.

A few years ago Sweden did a study on green hydrogen, the energy storage that Germany and many other countries seem to view as the best bet as a storage for places where solar + daily discharging batteries won't work. The cost was then around 10-20 times more expensive than nuclear. Those costs has gone down a bit since then, but it is still several times more expensive than nuclear.

Sweden and Germany are still very much in favor of green hydrogen, and there are on-going experiment to use it for industries that need hydrogen itself (rather than burning it for energy), but they are no investments for a grid storage. If nuclear is not economically viable, a technology that is several time more expensive is not something they are just going to throw money at. Those money are currently going towards fossil fuels, since that is cheaper than nuclear.

If however we would ban fossil fuel, especially cheap fossil fuel from Russia, the economics might change. There is also always the hope that politicians investment into fossil fuels today will give green hydrogen enough time to become economical viable for the energy sector.

[pfdietz]

China is selling electrolyzers for < $300/kw. Given that renewable electricity's LCOE is a fraction of nuclear, I don't see how hydrogen could be 10-20 times the cost of nuclear. Were they doing something ridiculous like assuming it's stored as liquid hydrogen?

Also, remember the big use of hydrogen on the grid would be as a dispatchable backstop to cheap renewable sources, not as something that's used 24/7. So most of the energy flow would not be through hydrogen, it would be from the renewables directly (or through batteries for short term smoothing.)

[belorn]

There is a massive war and shortage of natural gas in Europe so if there exist cheap electrolyzers + wind power combinations that can solve that issue today then people should rush to invest before next winter where prices are predicted to sky rock. I recall that the study did say that existing natural gas power plants could cheaply and easily be converted to run on hydrogen. Hydrogen prices has also gone up a lot since the war.

And it was 10-20 times a few years ago. Prices has gone down a significant bit. If you get the prices to around $1 per/kg (about 3-10x reduction from this year prices), and we don't account for transportation, infrastructure and physical storage, the price would start to look really competitive to nuclear.

If you search online you will find plenty of predictions that prices might reach that magical $1 per/kg in say 2030 or so, in which case that will be a great choice. As a bonus it will make medical oxygen dirt cheap. At that point all discussions about nuclear power will mostly be made moot since hydrogen will be the factual best choice.

[freemint]

Hydrogen needs an complete overhaul to the pipeline system. Burning natural gas for energy is a fraction of it's use. More important are heating (where it can't be transported too), steel making and chemistry (CoViD vaccine ingredients are made using natural gas by BASF).

[pfdietz]

Not to supply grid leveling it doesn't. For that, the hydrogen is produced, stored, and consumed in a small range of places.

[ncmncm]

Hydrogen can be added to dilute NG, during the transition.

[k8wk1]

This would still cause hydrogen embrittlement which results in cracked steel pipes.

[trashtester]

This study from MIT found that the LCOE of fully renewable energy production, backed by LI batteries would be $3000/MWh vs $2400/MWh for hydrogen instead of batteries for storage:

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/08/20210829-mitei.html

Either alternative is about 15x to 50x more expensive than Nuclear, though....

[pfdietz]

That's grossly excessive. This website lets you look at optimization vs. actual historical weather data and reaches a much lower cost. BTW, you use both batteries AND storage; their combination can be cheaper than either alone. You also store the hydrogen underground rather than above ground.

https://model.energy/

[trashtester]

I agree that a combination of batteries and hydrogen would be a bit cheaper, but generally I would trust the MIT study over the model above, that states directly that it is a toy model.

It's fun to play with, though, so definitely upvoted.

Do you have an alternative peer reviewed study to support the conclusions?

[pfdietz]

(Edited to actually look at the link)

Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen. It is not the average cost/kWh over all the energy being consumed off the grid.

Comparing this to nuclear is to compare apples and oranges. Nuclear supplies baseload, not additional seasonal power. If you tried to use nuclear to supply seasonal power the cost would be extreme. If you use nuclear to supply baseload, it is competing not just with hydrogen but also with much lower cost energy sent directly from renewables to the grid, and from batteries to the grid.

Of course the fraction of the output from the hydrogen fueled turbines will be expensive. But what we get from that toy model is the average cost of power, of which seasonally stored power is just a small part. In that toy model, nuclear is "Dispatchable 2", which you can enable, and which comes out to about 10 euro/kWh (EPR assumptions, perhaps optimistic considering Flamanville 3.)

[freemint]

I thought the article we are replying to said >>$4000+/MWh for nuclear not including financing.

[trashtester]

No, it is saying that it is currently about $6000000/MW construction cost. Then you devide by number of hours of operations to get the cost per MW/h. (Not adjusted for interest rate.)

The LCOE of new nuclear plants have estimates ranging from less than $30/MWh to around $150/MWh, while estimates for the cost of plants built a few decades ago end up at around $40-60/MWh, from the numbers I've seen.

[samstave]

Inflation is WAY fn higher than 8%.

Try more like 30%

Go to costco's meat section, walmarts juice section, any fn gas station.

Fleecing is whats happening.

EDIT:

Cool, clearly you arent tracking prices like I do.

Costco's meat section is up ~22%$

Walmarts Juices are up ~30%

We all know what gas prices are. $7 a gallon in Napa.